Last week right before we left for Yellowstone I went out to work on the sprinklers for the garden. I threw on some flip flops because that was easy. While walking around I felt something go over my foot. I thought it was the grass brushing against me ( I don’t like to mow the…
Scalr – Scalable Hosting Framework for Amazon Web Services
Amazon’s web services business has sparked a number of business opportunities. Using EC2 and S3 is not especially easy for a beginner, but scalable web architectures aren’t a place for the weak hearted geek. Enter Scalr. This is an open source project meant to make building a scalable, fault tolerant system on Amazon’s services easier….
Riding to Work Again
With all the moving around and general craziness at work I haven’t been able to ride to work as much. I finally managed to ride in again. Regardless of whatever else happens today is a good day.
Yellowstone 3
Day 3. More driving. Always driving. We went to Tower and watched more water fall off rocks. That seems to happen a lot around here. There were a couple of colorful characters hanging around near the parking lot with a sign that said, “save the buffalo” or something like that. The guy was really hairy…
Yellowstone 2
Sequels are never as good as the original so keep in mind that this one won’t be as good as the last one which wasn’t that great. I met more rangers today. Two of them seemed like very nice polite people. It probably helped that in the one case the lady was in a brand…
Yellowstone
We went to the happiest place on earth, now we’re off on a family vacation to the stinkiest place on Earth – Yellowstone. Like the Earth’s anus this place belches the nastiest gas you have ever smelled. The girls love it, but hold their noses a lot. I am good with it except for the…
51Weeks at ICLS
Last year for our open ed conference here at Utah State I built an application called 51weeks to help preserve the presentations and to help people interact. Tomorrow it will be used at ICLS in the Netherlands. The hardest part about these kinds of applications is life cycle management. I am frequently asked to build…
Eat and Ride
One of my favorite rides is Blacksmith Fork Canyon. If I leave from my house the loop is a little bit more than 40 miles most of which is in the canyon. During the summer it is a little bit cooler than the rest of the valley and the scenery is always beautiful. Now that…
Ruby on Rails – render :action doesn’t run action
I want to be cool like everyone else so I use a REST methodology for most of my Rails controllers these days. I wasn’t ever quite sure how my views managed to maintain values for a given object (User, Post, etc) after a failed call to create that that did a render :action => new….
Ajax calls using jQuery in Ruby on Rails
jQuery is the hot javascript library and it is small and it is cooler than Prototype, the default library that comes with Ruby on Rails. Ergo I plugged it in and pulled out everything else. The ajax calls are very simple and look like this: $.post(“function_name”,{ key:value } ,function(data) { // do stuff with data…